


gold is not enough

by sharkfights (feartown)



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: DELPHINE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!, F/F, more spoilers: it's not good my emotional state is vERY NOT GOOD, sorry my tags are never useful, spoilers for my emotional state, spoilers for the series to date
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-18
Updated: 2014-08-17
Packaged: 2018-02-05 04:31:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 14,477
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1805377
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feartown/pseuds/sharkfights
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He shuts the door and opens it again a few moments later, doing up the buttons on his coat. He looks at her, red-eyed in the cold. He sees the lamb; sees the knife, somehow, and takes pity on the blood dripping from her wounds. (Picks up immediately after 2x09.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> IN WHICH SOMEONE OTHER THAN COSIMA IS FINALLY NICE TO DELPHINE WITHOUT A GODDAMN AGENDA. YOU'RE WELCOME.

* * *

 

_I’ve made a terrible mistake._

 

 

 

She wipes her eyes on the backs of her hands, and waits for Cosima to tell her to leave. She expects it at this point – naïve, stupid Delphine who can never do anything right – but Cosima doesn’t tell her to leave. Cosima puts a warm hand on her arm and it says _I believe you_. Cosima looks at her and her eyes say _it’s okay_. Cosima doesn’t want her gone this time.

She breathes.

Cosima plucks at the hem of her shirt, fingertips kissing her hip. She wiggles her eyebrows, lines stark against the pallor of her feverish skin. “Come spoon with me.”

Delphine’s so relieved, so endeared and solaced and in love, that she half-sobs again.

Carefully, she manages to curl up into the space Cosima leaves her, bending around and pulling up her knees so they rest in the hollows of Cosima’s, their bodies slotted like puzzle pieces.

She finds her hand, twines their fingers together.

“We have the marrow, Cosima,” she says into her shoulder, and feels Cosima tense up in jerks everywhere they touch. Kira’s marrow, pulled from deep in her tiny, precious hip. Kira, who is finally in Rachel Duncan’s scaly clutches. “I know that it is now under… disastrous circumstances, but once it is ready we can use it to get you out of here.”

Cosima doesn’t say anything for a moment, then dodges the topic altogether. Delphine lets her. “So,” she says lightly. “Do I have to call you _Director_ Cormier now?”

Delphine chuckles, and feels Cosima’s one in kind. She nestles her chin into the crook of Cosima’s neck, breathes in the faint scent of shampoo, of warmth and the antiseptic, sterile hospital smell that permeates the room. “Mmmm, oui – it has a ring to it, don’t you think?”

“Holy shit, did you just make a _joke_?”

Delphine shoves her with a knee. It is heart-achingly _normal_ , murmuring in the ashy light of morning, even if she can still feel the grit of dried salt against her face. Cosima’s weight against her, the hum of sinew and laughter and bone, feels the same as it always has. Sweet. Assuaging. _Safe_.

But the thought that these tiny, crystalline moments are numbered and counting down is threatening to rip her apart.

 

 

 

 

Later, she huddles over culture dishes, handling the bone marrow more carefully than gold. This part is easy to her, the easiest thing she’s done in months. She understands this, the science-heartbeat, the layers – phagocytic cells, endothelial cells, lipid-laden adipocytes – she knows how they fit together, what they make, where they belong. People – the hurricanes they create and the lies they weave, they’re what she doesn’t know how to survive.

Cosima, earphones in, taps at her laptop in bed, resolutely working even though Delphine has told her no less than six times to rest.

Delphine stands, hooks her fingers together and stretches them above her head. Her back cracks with that satisfying, orphic noise, and when she looks back over at Cosima she’s watching her over the lid of her laptop.

“What?” she asks. Cosima grins.

“Oh, I’m just thinking about the things I’d totally be doing to you if I wasn’t hooked up to all this crap like friggin’ Frankenstein’s monster.”

Delphine bites her lip. Cosima is always straightforward, sometimes inappropriately so, and it makes her want to be similarly bold, test the boundaries. No one else has made her feel quite so intrepid.

“Oh?”

“Mmmhmm.” Cosima winks, assuming that Delphine is too flustered to retaliate, and she’s surprised when Delphine edges out from in front of her stool, walks over to sit on the bed with her hip pressed to Cosima’s thigh.

“And what… what would you do?” she asks, halting and mildly embarrassed, wondering just how unprofessional it is to be conducting such conversations in their workplace. Of course, the other, baser part of her is wholly interested in the flick of Cosima’s tongue over her lip, the deepening brown of her irises as she tilts her head and studies Delphine’s face.

She lifts a hand, lets her fingers fidget against the front of Delphine’s shirt. “Mmm, I dunno, like, maybe I’d lay you down on that desk and make you come in my mouth a couple dozen times.”

The matter of fact way she says it has a smile widening across Delphine’s face, eyebrows creasing in a strange kind of incredulous delight. “You are so romantic, ma cherie.”

Cosima grins back at her. “I know, right?”

Delphine moves to get up, thinking the game is over, but Cosima stops her with a hand tightening around her shirt. Her heart skips a beat.

“I would, though.” Her voice pitches low, so low and so warm that it coils in Delphine’s stomach like a bending snake, honeyed and slithering. “I can tell you how. Like, seriously, or whatever.”

Delphine bites her lip again, feels her teeth hard against fragile skin, and nods. It’s unfamiliar territory, but stepping into it has created a steady kind of shiver up and down her spine, and she wants to ride it out.

“Well, first I’d get rid of this,” she says, undoing a shirt button. “As cute as you look in it.”

Her hand leaves Delphine’s chest, skips down her torso and stops on her thigh. “Then I’d lay you down and take these _ridiculous_ jeans off, kiss you right—” her fingers dip, press into a spot just above her knee, and Delphine draws in a sharp breath. Cosima smiles, oddly delighted.

“There.” Cosima leans in, and her mouth rests close to her cheek, hot on her skin. “And I’d um, kiss _all_ the way up until you were saying my name, and your hands were doing that thing—”

Delphine knows _that_ _thing_ , and she does it to play along, sliding a hand up into Cosima’s dreads, fingertips pressed sweetly against her skull.

Cosima’s eyes close, her lips brushing against Delphine’s cheek in a smile. “Yeah,” she says, breathy and almost giggling. “Like that.”

Delphine lets her other hand rest at the base of Cosima’s throat, her thumb tracing into the knot of her clavicle. But Cosima brushes her hand away, catches her fingers with her own.

“Nuh uh,” she whispers, unbuttoning Delphine’s jeans with her free fingers. “Get up here,” she says, and tugs on the hand she has in her grasp.

Delphine obliges, slides her knees either side of Cosima’s thighs, rests her weight back on her heels.

“Better,” Cosima murmurs, as Delphine finds her hair again. She kisses her, tongue heavy against teeth, and Delphine thaws into it, feels the press of Cosima’s glasses and the tube in her nose. The shiver in her spine concentrates low, spreading out and sending her hips pitching forward, a whine bubbling in her throat.

“And now?” Delphine manages to choke out, caught in a weird halfway-reality, her synapses purring with the timbre of Cosima’s voice, the hypnotic pull of her words; completely subservient to the low humming fire in her belly.

Cosima smiles and directs the hand she’s holding to the waistband of Delphine’s underwear. Delphine feels the breath leave her body, pulse thudding hard through every helix of muscle down to her toes.

“Wait,” Cosima says, her eyes fixed on Delphine’s hand. “Do it slowly.”

Delphine does, edges her fingers down through the tight space between underwear and skin, rolls her hips with a gasp when they find satiny purchase. Cosima kisses her again, presses their parted mouths together and leans in with the damp velvet slide of tongue, letting a hand roam under Delphine’s shirt.

“Cos _ima_ ,” she says on a groan, still not able to catch a breath; the throbbing, nervous energy already building around her fingers as she rocks against them. She can taste the faint bite of metal on her tongue.

Cosima leans into her ear, and her voice is scratchy, teasing, when she speaks. “Show me how wet you are, Dr Cormier,” she says, the white of her teeth catching against the hard _t_.

Delphine moans, her mouth sliding messily down over Cosima’s jaw. Cosima never does this, Cosima is a girl of whispered curses and _fuck, Delphine_ and lengthy prayers to gods Delphine has never heard of. This Cosima is different, and Delphine is intoxicated by her. She drags her hand out from between them, slicks her fingers gently into Cosima’s mouth.

Her eyes close when Cosima sucks, whining deep in her throat at the stroke of her tongue and the scrape of her teeth. She grinds herself hard into Cosima’s thighs, and Cosima, chuckling, guides her saturated fingers back down to the unbearable heat between her legs. A hand tugs into Delphine’s hair at the base of her skull, grips and pulls lightly so her head tips back, and Cosima sends her tongue up the column of her throat. Delphine thinks, possibly, she may be headed for a Dickensian episode of spontaneous combustion, the searing heat under her fingers threatening to lick up her body in yellow flames.

Cosima clears her throat and there is passing thought that she is too sick for this, too sick to have the ungraceful weight of Delphine rumpling against her, moaning too loud and too close at the thrust of her hand. She is _dying_ , but the strength of her mouth and the press of her fingers under her bra say nothing more than _right now I am_ alive.

“God, Delphine,” Cosima groans suddenly, and Delphine’s lips tip into a brief smile. A crack in her polished-cool veneer, finally. Her gaze is back on the movement of Delphine’s wrist between her thighs, the erratic rhythm her hips can’t quite keep up with. “You’re really, really hot.”

Delphine gasps out a laugh and wonders, deliriously, if there’s a way they can lock themselves up tight in this moment forever.

 

 

After she comes down from her dizzying high, she leaves Cosima to sleep and heads back upstairs to her office on quivering legs. _Her_ office.

Not twenty-four hours ago that thought had sent a scurrying thrill through her. Here, she had thought, she might have power. Here, she might be able to change Cosima’s fate. The DYAD might be her machine, now, to wield and shape the way she wants.

Thoughts like bullets. Thoughts that spilled and bled through her and pressed in with hope.

Now, though, cauterized, she sees things as they are.

She sits at her desk. It feels like millions of years since Aldous Leekie first approached her, charming and erudite, and offered the universe. He spoke so eloquently, he made her feel like she could create a whole new world under a microscope and have it _mean_ something. It was all she’d ever wanted, to mean something.

Now, with Leekie’s title in her grasp, the lies he told are almost ironic. Aldous never really believed the things he said, he was too wrapped up in the marvels of cloning human beings – the _Neolution_ of it all – to really think _Delphine_ was capable of rising surely through the ranks.

She smiles faintly at the absurdity of it. Cosima: somewhere below her, dying of a disease no one seems to really want to cure. Outside the handful of souls in their lab, Cosima’s illness is a blip on the radar, comfortably buried deep beneath the prison walls and out of sight.

Rachel Duncan: somewhere outside, holding Sarah’s daughter hostage with intentions she can’t even begin to fathom.

Leekie: corpse in the ground.

Delphine rests her head in her hands, headache reeling in white. Everything here is too clean, too bright-washed, and she wishes desperately for the cool dark of Cosima’s room back in Minnesota, the drinking pull of Cosima’s lips and the sling of her arms around Delphine’s body. She misses that Cosima so much – the steady, reassuring tow of her, the firmness of her grip around her hand while dragging her across a snowy courtyard. That Cosima, she knows, is lost to fits of red, holed up in a lab that tells her with sterile composure that she has little time left on Earth. Delphine bites her lip.

If she could, she’d reach in below her ribs and draw out her own lungs, healthy and heaving and wet, and say _here, take these, if it means you live_. Stupid, that she has filled them with toxic smoke and they have endured, but Cosima has done nothing but exist as synthetic and identical and hers are giving in.

It is stupid and unfair that Cosima, seraph and raw with her forgiveness and her charm, has a body that is trying to betray her.

Delphine sighs. It’s still early, not yet nine in the morning, but there is a man standing sentinel outside her door. Everyone here has a shadow – men with earpieces, men who watch and look like hawks, and she supposes Directors are no exception. A bodyguard (a spy), whom she knows will report any move she makes to Rachel.

 _Rachel_. She knows certainly now that Rachel is not her friend. Rachel does not truly believe they can take the program in a different direction. Rachel sees moves on a chessboard, she sees contenders in battle. Delphine is just another lamb at the altar to Rachel Duncan. A means to an end.

Delphine feels sick to her stomach at the lengths she will go, so similar yet vastly alien to the lengths Delphine will go herself. She feels hatred rise up like bile inside her belly – Delphine Cormier does not feel _hatred_ for many people; she did not even feel hatred for Aldous, in the end, but she thinks Rachel might deserve it. She thinks Rachel might almost deserve the turn of a knife in her gut. Sharp, red. A fitting end.

However, even if Rachel was lying, even if she gave Delphine this position to use her, Delphine sits at her desk – _her desk_ – and thinks, just maybe, there is some good she can do here.

Most importantly, she can apologise to Sarah for what she has inadvertently done. She can tell Sarah, and the caged animal that she sees in Sarah, that she was only trying to help.

 

 

She turns up outside Siobhan Sadler’s house, and is determined to make things right.

They won’t be pleased to see her, she’s sure; they never are. Delphine is the DYAD to them, she is the traitorous machine that spits out agendas and falsehoods no matter how many times she tries to deny it.

She knows they have no obligation to trust her because of this, she _knows_ and she understands, but she wishes desperately that they would. She would like them to see the truth as easily as Delphine sees the truth in them: Sarah’s blazing love for her daughter, like wildfire licking at the ragged skeletons of brush. Felix’s need to keep Sarah in her skin and held close. Their foster mother, their fierce lion-mother, crossing in front of Delphine to keep her at bay.

Felix answers the door with a sigh that rolls down to his tilted hip, arms crossing over his chest.

“Well look who’s brave enough to be showing their face. What do you want, Delphine?”

She feels foolish and spindling, her hands knotting together and then coming undone.

“Felix, I—I’m—”

 _I didn’t mean for this to happen_.

 _I need you to believe me_.

 _I will do anything to help you find that little girl_.

 _Cosima is dying and I am afraid of being alone_.

She had rehearsed the things she wanted to say, practiced the inflection and made sure nothing could be construed. She’d been so careful, so anxious for things to go well, and now, out in the snow with her breath fogging between them, she suddenly has nothing to say at all.

There are tears hot in the corners of her eyes, though, sending the edges of her vision into blurs. It was not meant to go like this – she was supposed to be courageous and articulate, to plead her case with sincerity and vow to help any way she could. She was not meant to end up crying on the porch in front of a boy who she’s fairly sure loathes the sight of her.

“Jesus Christ.” Felix throws a look over his shoulder, and then turns back to Delphine. “Wait here. Sarah will kill you on the spot if she sees you.”

He shuts the door and opens it again a few moments later, doing up the buttons on his coat. He looks at her, red-eyed in the cold. He sees the lamb; sees the knife, somehow, and takes pity on the blood dripping from her wounds.

“You’ve got a car, I assume?”

Delphine nods. She feels very sinister driving around the city in the back of a limo, the leather too slick against her back, but the privacy it affords is worth it.

“Good, we’re going to my apartment.”

 

 

Felix sits her down on his couch after a car ride filled with fraught radio silence, and places a glass in front of her.

“Drink.”

It’s whiskey, and it’s cheap, and it burns like gold on the way down her throat. She can breathe again.

“I’m sorry, Felix.” She’s not even sure what she’s apologising for anymore, she just knows it’s about time she said it. She should have said it to Sarah when she had the chance, barged past Felix’s protest and found Sarah’s hands with her own. _I wish I could take it back_.

Felix smudges a finger into the corner of his eye. “Can we just… not do that right now? I’d like to be considerably drunker before we get into why you let my niece get kidnapped, if that’s all right with you.”

Delphine downs what’s left in her glass, and almost smiles at Felix’s vague surprise when she sets it back down on the table.

“What?” she asks, “You think you are the only one who needs to be intoxicated?”

 

 

“Merde,” she says half an hour later. “ _Merde_.”

There is something slow playing from a stereo, disjointed and throbbing, and she is well and truly _drunk_. The whiskey sings through her bloodstream, shores itself along her stomach lining, and her head tips back to study the ceiling.

Felix, much more in control of his limbs, pours the last of the bottle into his mouth with a practiced flick of his wrist, then crashes down next to her on the couch.

“ _So_ ,” he says, the word flaring dramatically, “What’s it like being the new head Neolution-wizard of the DYAD Institute? Do you get a pointy hat to go with your bullshit title?”

Delphine lets a wary giggle bubble out of her. “Neolution was Aldous’s passion, not mine. I mean I was… _interested_ , for a time, but my heart remains closest to more… traditional science. Tangible.”

Felix looks at her for a moment. _About as tangible as your dreadlocked girlfriend, I’ll bet_. “So how long did you shag him for?”

She looks away, her face red. “I…” Not even Cosima has asked – Delphine is sure she _suspects_ , given her familiarity, given the circumstances surrounding their first few meetings – but she has left all of that alone. “We did not love each other.”

Felix snorts. “Nice dodge. Diplomatic.”

Delphine tips her head in faux-salute, and grimaces as her vision swirls. “I think I need to lie down.”

“Oh, god, don’t be _weak_. Come on, Amazon, up and up.”

Lurching to his own feet, Felix pulls Delphine off the couch and sways over to the kitchen to locate a joint. He turns back with it between his teeth, and lights it up as he watches Delphine try to get her bearings. She should have stood up _before_ downing half a bottle of whiskey, she thinks with more than a flicker of regret.

“Good _lord_. When was the last time you were drunk, 2005?”

“I am _fine_ ,” Delphine says, kicking into the coffee table with a shin and swearing under her breath. It should be embarrassing, but in the aftermath of the last few days, after completely losing the fraying ends of her rope, Delphine can’t find it in her to do anything but laugh at herself. It’s a hysterical, sobbing kind of laugh that she hides in her hands, fingers pushing into her eye sockets. It stretches in her chest, balloons up against her ribs. Hurts somewhere deep.

“You’ve lost it,” Felix says, tendrils of smoke curling out his mouth.

“Yes, possibly,” Delphine replies, glad when Felix catches her elbow, holds her steady.

He pulls her in, shaking his head, and they find some kind of winding, drunken rhythm to the music playing in the background.

It has been a long time, innumerable days and countless barren weeks, since Delphine has felt like she’s had a friend. But with Felix’s hand dropping to sit loose against the small of her back, his dragon-smoke breath clouding in her hair, it feels so close to friendship that she wants to cry again.

Trying to keep the lumpy sob hiding in her throat from escaping, she falls awkwardly around Felix in a hug, her arms feeling too long and unwieldy against the unfamiliar angles of his shoulders. Felix sighs loudly. _Poor little lamb_. _Perhaps you’re better off under that knife after all_.

“I really did not mean for this to happen, Felix,” she says, suddenly urgently needing him to believe her.

His voice rumbles pleasantly near her ear. “First impressions are hard to shake, sister,” he replies, but there is no malice in it.

“And second ones,” Delphine agrees.

“Sarah will come around.”

“She scares me,” Delphine says, and remembers the rigid line of her, the claw of her fingers into her hip while she looked so much like Cosima and yet so different. A slipping mask applied to a different, hastier skin.

Felix laughs a single, breathy _ha_. “She scares us all, cupcake.”

A beat.

“I kissed her, you know,” she blurts, horrified even before she finishes her sentence. She hasn’t even told Cosima that one. _Drunk_.

“Wait, you kissed… _Sarah_?”

“Well, I thought she was Cosima,” Delphine clarifies, and feels Felix flick the butt of his joint somewhere in the direction of the sink.

“Good lord.” His fingers tap idly at her back. Her head feels filled with soupy fog. “We’re a bloody incestuous lot, aren’t we?”

There is something in his words that makes her think Felix is a little closer to this than he’s letting on, but she doesn’t press it. He has shouldered enough tonight, and she is too tired. She shifts her grip around his back, lets her forehead clunk onto a shoulder.

“Thank you, Felix.”

He kisses the side of her head in reply.

 

 

Delphine feels tossed into the roaring sea of a hangover when she wakes up snarled in Felix’s sheets. He stirs next to her and for a horrifying second she wonders what happened between the last thing she remembers and right now.

“Don’t flatter yourself,” Felix drawls from somewhere in their linen nest. “Last night was depressingly G-rated.”

“Oh, thank god.”

“’Thank god’? Wow, if _that’s_ how you’re going to be…”

Delphine laughs stupidly, an arm tossed over her eyes. Too much whiskey, too many mistakes. Too many problems blooming against her chest. She lets the darkness her arm affords soothe the burn in her throat, the nauseous pump of blood in her head.

She suddenly feels incredibly guilty because there is a tiny, selfish part of her that wants to stay tangled here in this square of bed until everything fades away, until she finally sees the world fall apart. Houses of cards. At least there are no monsters here.

Felix sighs, rooted steady in reality. “One of us needs to make coffee.”

She makes a murmuring noise of agreement. Then, “You are a good friend, Felix. A good brother,” out of nowhere. The words feel strange in her mouth, much like saying _sister_ to Sarah. They are not words Delphine – always alone – has ever learned to use comfortably. Still, she felt she should say them. Felix didn't spare her a thought yesterday, and now she is anchored in his bed.

“I don’t have much choice, do I?”

She finds his hand.

“None of us do.”

 

 

 

Cosima is sleeping when Delphine returns to her, headache booming in her ears, and for a few moments she watches carefully for the rise and fall of her chest. It’s a habit she wishes she hadn’t picked up. Smoking cigarettes, checking that her girlfriend’s still alive. Litanies of vices. She puts a gentle hand on Cosima’s shoulder.

“Cosima?”

“Hey,” she says, her voice thready and swollen with sleep. “You okay?”

“Yes, I just wanted to come and check on you before I start my… my _work_. Are you okay?”

Cosima smiles, beatific and sweet – like she isn’t dying, like she is not made up of frail crunching bird bones and broken hitches of air. Like there isn’t a howling wolf inside her that wishes to snatch up her life between savage teeth. “I’m peachy.”

“Good,” she says, and wishes with all her might that it were true.

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There is terror in her stomach, nettling under her ribs and clamping down with teeth. She has made a mistake. (Picks up after the elevator scene in 2x10.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am beginning to think I'm the only person who believes this but: Delphine never got on that plane, right? Like far be it from me to tell the OB writers how to handle their own character but seriously, you spend a season building up this fierce protector, this person who literally says she will do anything to help Cosima, you deliberately spend all of 2x09 anchoring her to characters outside of her little Cosima bubble - you make her /important/ - but in the first five minutes of the finale you (apparently, since I guess I can't say it's actually canon that she's there) ship her off to Germany and literally every character - except Cosima for approximately 5 seconds - forgets she even exists??? I find that INCREDIBLY hard to believe.
> 
> Anyway, so, I've thoroughly ignored the fact that I'm super woozy with a flu thing right now, super bogged down with real life, whatever, and written... this. It's far too long and it doesn't /really/ make sense as a second chapter (or possibly at all, I've had a lot of drugs today) buuuuut I... don't care. It's important that everyone knows that I DO NOT BELIEVE DELPHINE IS IN GERMANY. I will fight everyone on this.

* * *

 

_There is a moment where Rachel thaws._

_Delphine sees it in the crinkle of her spine, her paused step._

_For one, tiny moment, Rachel Duncan feels Delphine’s words press up hard against her mechanical ticking heart and thinks about the part of her that remains human. But this is not Rachel’s doing, this is an order filtering down from above. It is truly not, just as she says,_ personal _._

_So Delphine, distraught, sees the doors close callously in front of her._

_Turns out there is no good she can do here._

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

She is on a plane.

Or, there is a version of her on a plane. There is a Delphine who has accepted that the DYAD will not let her continue, that they have barred the gates and swallowed the key. There is a Delphine – Beraud, perhaps; not very brave – who has flown across the world with a cracked-open heart to let Cosima die without her. In another reality, the DYAD has gotten their way once again.

In this reality, however, there is wet pavement under her heels and no air in her lungs, and somewhere far behind her a DYAD security guard is calling his superiors and likely setting loose a pack of hounds. Delphine takes a moment to stop and throw her phone at a faceless brick building and watch it shatter into pieces, not trusting that it isn’t being tracked. She finds the biggest parts and dumps them in a trash can with her tickets, then slides into an alley.

The cold concrete at her back is a reminder of solid things, things that refuse to crumble or bend, and she finds a fleeting moment of comfort in it. Rummaging in her purse with trembling, snapping-branch fingers, she finds a dishevelled carton of cigarettes and pulls them out. All she can hear is the blood walloping in her ears, the rasp of her breath.

There is terror in her stomach, nettling under her ribs and clamping down with teeth. She has made a mistake. Delphine has made a lot of mistakes, but this is the first one she’s afraid might actually get her killed. She surrounds her lighter with a palm, cigarette pressed between her lips, and breathes in deep. The smoke hollows her out, makes her feel the empty spaces inside her body. She watches it stream out of her nostrils, dissipate on the air, and waits for that heady calm to filter through.

Her hands shake, they shake like they might never stop, but her heartbeat slows, her head stops spinning. She is not thoroughly without options here. The city is large and there are places to hide. She can brick herself up, stitch through the terror, build a disguise. She can find Cosima and keep the promise she vowed not to break.

First, though, she needs DYAD off her tail, even for a few hours.

She stubs out her cigarette with a heel and puts on her coat, bundles her hair up on her head with a couple of pins from her purse. It will not hide her for long, she’s sure, but maybe just long enough.

Peering around the lip of the alley, she can’t see an army hurtling toward her, no cavalry charge, so she takes a brave step out and heads across the street, ducking into a coffee shop and pulling out her laptop at an empty table. Delphine wonders briefly if it’s _too_ obvious, booking plane tickets on a DYAD-monitored computer right after escaping their clutches. But then, she reasons, DYAD probably never expected her to escape them in the first place.

 

 

 

 

She catches a taxi to the other side of the city, stopping at a department store before locating the most nondescript motel she can find – one with peeling signage and a kind of hunched sadness about its walls – and hurrying inside.

Nervously, she walks up to the front desk like she’s already been caught, like the man in front of her works for the DYAD and is about to inform her there is no escape. He is long and thin like tree shadows, brows heavy above his eyes. _Don’t look like you have something to hide_ , she tells herself, and tries a smile.

The man at the desk regards her over a pair of dollar store glasses, unimpressed. “We don’t do that here,” he says, and that’s clearly the end of their discussion for him.

Delphine looks down at herself, confused. “I’m sorry, I’m looking to… I want to rent a room?”

At her accent, the man looks even less enthused. “I said we don’t do that here. You want a by-the-hour business you go down the street. I run a family establishment here, ma’am.”

Delphine looks around the room and resists the urge to wrinkle her nose. She would certainly not bring a child here. She really has no idea what this man is talking about.

“I am looking to rent a room for the night, possibly more. You cannot do that?”

The man hesitates, and Delphine hates him for it. She is tired of running already, she is tired of being out in the open and not having a locked door between her and the people she’s sure are hunting her. Her pulse quickens again, throbbing just under her skin. _Hurry_.

Finally, he starts tapping at his keyboard, still giving her sidelong glances. He asks for a name and when she immediately thinks _Rachel Duncan_ she almost laughs. “Scott,” she says, and when the man looks at her she musters up a little of Rachel – just to continue in the spirit of irony – and raises an eyebrow. “Do you _need_ a first?”

The man, sullen, writes it down, and Delphine feels a small blossom of something like pride in her chest. One step at a time.

He hands her a key, directs her to her room with a wrinkled hand and a distinctly contemptuous lack of eye contact. As she shuts the reception door it suddenly dawns on her. _Oh_ , she thinks. _Oh_ , _he thought I was a_ prostitute.

She wants immediately to go back and correct his mistake, apologize for making him think that, and then shakes her head. Cosima would just _love_ this. She almost smiles, wry at the thought of Cosima waiting in the background, knowing _exactly_ what was going on and hinting about it with a clever jab, waiting until they were out of earshot to cackle something like _he totally thought you were someone’s like, super classy escort_ while wiggling her eyebrows and rutting playfully into Delphine’s hip. _Ooh, Ms Cormier, how much for an hour in the limo?_

 

 

In her room she shrugs off her coat and feels the air wash over the damp stick of her shirt at her back. A little reminder of her still-wild heartbeat. The shower has the pressure of a spitting, hesitant rainfall, but she washes away the sweat and grime of Rachel’s words, the grip of that guard’s hand around her arm, and when she steps out of the tub there is a moment – one spindly, fragile moment – where she feels like maybe she can keep it together.

In a discoloured towel she stands in front of the clothes she bought. Shades of black. A page borrowed from the book of Sarah Manning: veteran of disguises and lies.

Black clothes, beating heart. Everything throbs with something desperately, painfully lonely. She doesn’t know how to be without Cosima anymore, feels the prickle of her ghost at her side, and almost doesn’t understand why she can’t just reach out and touch her.

Dinner is a banana and a candy bar from the vending machine, a cup of coffee and a keening ache in her gut. She sits at the folding card table and it feels like prison, listening to the fuzzy chatter of her neighbour’s television and the distant noise of a hairdryer. Nothing in the world has ever made her feel this isolated.

She wants nothing more than to contact Cosima and hear the familiar timbre of her voice, but she doesn’t know what’s happened in her absence, she doesn’t know if Cosima’s been locked away somewhere in punishment for what Delphine has done; caged like something savage.

With a jolt of panic, she realizes she doesn’t know for sure if Cosima is even still alive. It terrifies her, makes her hands tremble again – leaf-skeletons, frail twigs, bird wings – and she wants to run, tear into the freezing belly of the DYAD and crack her teeth on arctic bones as she drags Cosima out from inside it. Delphine won’t let them keep her, even if she is a lifeless body on a slab in the morgue.

She needs a plan, though, as heroic as running in blind sounds. So she will wait, lonely in this greying motel-cell, bide her time until the waters settle and she can move a little easier. _One step at a time, Cormier_.

 

 

The room is marred by sickly green curtains and a fridge that hums. Everything feels damp and she sleeps with the light on, sleep that is picked at by phantoms haunting between the slices of darkness under the doors. Salt wets the tips of her fingers, grainy and bleak.

In the morning she dresses, black on black, and feels like a stranger when she looks at herself in the mirror. No buttons, no patterns, no floating fabric. She’s thoroughly inconspicuous and bland, though the leather panels on her jacket shine with something like malice, and it really does feel like she’s trying to inhabit someone else. Perhaps it’s the spy she never thought she’d be able to play.

She buys a burner phone, plugs Cosima’s phone number into it and almost dials, but she’s too afraid of what she might hear on the other end. The day passes in fits and jitters, the back of her neck constantly prickling with the thought of hands closing around her throat. She’s not cut out for this kind of thing.

 

 

 

 

When it gets dark she takes a cab across town to the west, climbing out onto a poorly lit street. She walks with her shoulders bowed forward and her heart thumping echoes in her chest. _Don’t let them see_.

It is here the city oozes, here that there are knives in the dark. It is here that neon wolves prowl, scenting blood. She can feel them licking up her heels; shiny white wolves with shiny white teeth hot after the lamb that has skittered from their gaping jaws.

Briefly, her mind wanders: In Frankfurt she could be sitting in a sunny apartment overlooking the water, curtains filmy and wafting in the breeze. She could be blind to DYAD’s plans, working on the kinds of things she became a scientist for at the start.

She could be a stone’s throw from home.

But the word _home_ leaves a peculiar taste in her mouth. Crimson metal. No, she thinks, France is home to another Delphine who gave up and got on a plane. Cosima is what home means now, home is the spaces she leaves for Delphine to notch into and the steady pump of her heart under Delphine’s hands. _Cosima_ is the only reason she needs to be a scientist.

Suddenly she feels guilty for even considering slipping into another skin. She thinks about being suffocated in a foreign lab, with Rachel Duncan still watching from above – strings dangling from her hands. Delphine has made a nice puppet so far, so willing to bend and obey. No, she knows she would still be under Rachel’s thumb even that far away. Stupid.

She hurries a little faster across the street, watching derelict buildings rise alien into the sky, and she’s relieved to finally see the familiar graffitied walls of Felix’s block come into view.

 

 

When she knocks on the door, she expects to see Felix’s still-arrogant glare, or possibly even Sarah’s more potent one. What she doesn’t expect – what she hadn’t hoped for even a second – is to see Cosima standing apprehensively on slippered feet, oxygen tank propping her up, just as surprised to see Delphine as Delphine is to see her.

For a moment, they just look at each other. For a moment, Delphine sees Cosima as though they’ve never met before, a split-second stranger swaying in front of her, beautiful and alarmed.

Then Cosima says “Delphine?” with strangled disbelief, and Delphine launches forward with a barrelling lack of grace, folding around Cosima and fusing them together in desperate clutches. Her hands find Cosima’s ribs like piano keys, stroke up her back in grasping currents, her mouth full of hair and threatening sobs. The oppressing melancholy of the last two days melts off her skin as she breathes in Cosima’s warmth and the clinging reminder of weed, feels the comforting stretch of arms around her shoulders.

“Cosima, I didn’t – I thought you were still at the DYAD.”

“I was. Scott got me out – he… he got us all out. That cutie’s a hero.”

Her voice rasps, tired and sandpapery against Delphine’s skin, and Delphine pulls back to look at her. Frail and teetering, she looks worse than she did even two days ago on her hospital cot. But there are glittering cities in Cosima’s eyes, brave streets of prisming green and brown – they _shine_ in a way that Delphine realizes has become unfamiliar, and she smiles.

“You look pleased,” she says.

“You’re here,” Cosima replies, and Delphine sees a glance of teeth beneath her grinning lips. “And now that you are, I have something to show you.”

 

 

Delphine pours over The Island of Doctor Moreau well into the night, long after Cosima fills her in and falls asleep against her side. Long after it finally sinks in that she is here, that Cosima is still happily alive. That for now, at least, she is safe. The loft is quiet – Felix and Sarah took Kira back to Siobhan’s, Cosima said; they didn’t want her staying in one place too long. It is serene in here, nestled under yellow lights. Somewhere among Felix’s possessions there is a gentle tick and the reassuring hum of something electronic; the rumble of old pipes. Cosima breathes in even swells, and Delphine feels like she has made it home.

 

 

She wakes in the morning to Cosima’s hand palming over her stomach, and she smiles with her eyes still closed.

“Sorry for KO’ing on you,” Cosima says. “I’ve been feeling kinda under the weather.”

Delphine snorts, cracks an eye open. Cosima is grinning at her with a warmth that could power the world. “How long have you been waiting to make that joke?”

“Oh, you have no idea.”

She leans down, and her mouth is soft against Delphine’s, kissing with the gentleness of moth-wings, delicate and grey. Kissing in bursts like a heartbeat. Delphine runs her tongue along Cosima’s bottom lip and she sighs, her fingers gripping a little tighter into Delphine’s side.

When she pulls back, Delphine strokes a thumb over her cheek, seeking out the lines of bone under her skin, seeking out those markers that say _you are identical, but you are not the same_.

Cosima smiles. There is a lightness between them, something dusted on the air and singing brightly like the sun streaming through the windows above them. Delphine relishes the heat, the drifting weight of Cosima’s hand, her mind thinking _light, light, light_. It is a brittle and shaking feeling, unfurling tentatively, but it has caught. Settled in.

It feels disturbingly like hope.

 

 

 

Later, Delphine finds Cosima pressed up against the mirror in the bathroom, trying to keep her hand steady to apply her eyeliner.

“Cosima?”

“Hey, just give me a sec.” She pauses, looks at her gently trembling hand. “Or, like, three hours. Then we can get to work.”

“Do you…” Delphine doesn’t know how precious Cosima wants to be about putting on her own battle armor, because she knows the swipes of black around her lids do more to ward away evil than a suit of metal ever would. “Could I help?”

Cosima unfolds herself from her awkward position in front of the mirror. She regards Delphine for a moment, like she’s not sure what she’s asking. “Oh. Um. I mean, sure, if you want.”

Delphine smiles. “Come sit on the couch, there is better light.”

She sits and crosses her legs up under her, and when Cosima drags herself over she does the same, knees banked over Delphine’s thighs. She’s different – Cosima has too many sharp angles now, too many juts of bone under paper-thin skin, and Delphine wishes for the return of her fuller cheeks, the softness above her elbows, the mending of her insides. _There is a key now_ , she reminds herself. There is hope.

Delphine holds up the eyeliner, immediately unsure of how to slant her arm, and tries a tentative stroke under Cosima’s left eye. Cosima watches her with a half-born smile, warm at the edges, and Delphine smiles back with her lip between her teeth.

“I think this is going to look quite terrible,” she admits. She’s not even sure she could achieve Cosima’s clever Egyptian curves on her own face, let alone someone else’s.

Cosima shrugs, forever bohemian and forgiving. “Do it anyway. I need something to laugh at, it might as well be myself.”

Delphine sets her hand to work again, her lines crude and uneven. Her hand can’t seem to follow the path she wants it to, unsteady with the thought that she might as well be drawing on an image in a mirror.

She pulls back to look at her handiwork, and shakes her head. “I am not a makeup artist.”

“You are cute though,” Cosima says, and Delphine quirks an eyebrow. “When you were drawing, you… I don’t know, your mouth kept making like weird little movements. Totally adorable.”

“Oh?”

Cosima leans in and Delphine feels oddly giddy – cocooned in a sweet slumbering moment as Cosima kisses her. She drops the eyeliner onto the coffee table and crafts her hands along the line of Cosima’s jaw, lips steady and wanting. A cough catches in Cosima’s throat.

“I’m sorry,” Delphine says, pulling back. She’d forgotten – blood on her teeth, growths in her lungs. So easy, when Cosima puts on that grinning mask and rasps out jokes like she was born into comedy.

Tugging Delphine forward again, settling her weight gently on top of her as she leans back, Cosima sighs. “Can we pretend for like, five minutes that everything’s not falling apart? I feel _good_ , Delphine. I have Ethan’s book. You’re not like, in Germany or whatever. We’re all together, _and_ I’ve been thinking about you in that totally bangin’ black outfit since last night. I mean, let’s not examine the fact that you kinda looked like Sarah in it, because that’s—”

Delphine kisses her, kisses the babbling from her mouth and the skittering thoughts right out of her head. Cosima moans and Delphine kisses in paintbrush strokes, broad licks of tongue and smears of lip, brimming with ocean-feelings for the genetic miracle beneath her. Cosima, who loves so earnestly even when she shouldn’t. Cosima, who sees the beauty in all things the Earth has created, even herself.

Cosima, who is so full of life even when she’s dying.

She shifts against her body, now interested only in the frisson she gets from the movement of clothing between them, the gentle pitch of Cosima’s hips rolling up to meet her. She barely registers the door sliding back and Felix stepping inside until he starts yelling at them.

“Oi!” he says, just as Cosima palms a hand over her breast and finds a guttural sigh lurking in her throat, and she jerks back, sheepish.

“ _Oi_ , science dykes—half-dykes, whatever it is you’re calling yourselves – could you maybe _refrain_ from shagging on my couch?”

Cosima, apparently unbothered by Felix’s arrival, slides her hands down Delphine’s back, tucks them under the curve of her ass and tugs her neatly over her thigh. Delphine lets out a tiny yelp of noise and doesn’t really know what to do, all too aware of Felix’s disapproval from across the room.

“Oh, Delphine,” Cosima says throatily, dramatically, her gaze fixated on Felix’s cranky slouch in the doorway. “Don’t stop; give it to me, take me hard,” she rattles off with a smirk, and Delphine gets hold of the sarcasm. She giggles into Cosima’s shoulder and rocks her hips, listens to the hard _oh_ of Cosima’s satirical moan before Cosima’s laughing too, a little breathless.

“Lord help me, if you weren’t dying you’d _so_ be out the door.”

Cosima wiggles her eyebrows at him, tongue between her teeth, and Felix rolls his eyes. _Brat_.

“You’ve been spending _far_ too much time with Sarah,” he says, perfectly disdainful, and shuts the door before stalking into the kitchen to make tea. Delphine can’t do anything but grin stupidly, too caught up in the coltish way Felix and Cosima banter, too delighted by how much they feel like normal people again.

“Oh no,” Cosima says, her hands squeezing where they still rest on Delphine’s ass, “Felix, do you think she might be… _rubbing off_ on me?”

She laughs almost hysterically at her own joke, and Delphine only hears a muttered _Jesus_ Chr _ist_ from the kitchen in response.

Delphine watches the crease of Cosima’s smile fade, and presses a kiss to her mouth. Cosima holds it, slips a quick lick against her lips, and Delphine feels something kindle where Felix’s arrival had snuffed it out. She pins Cosima more firmly with her hips, strokes heavy into her mouth with tongue and momentarily ignores Felix waiting for his kettle to boil.

Felix, however, does not ignore anything.

“Will you _stop it_?” he hisses. “It’s just un _fair_. With you two around, and Sarah and that plaid tree-trunk of a lumberjack – not to mention bloody Alison all but acting out her renewed sex life with Donnie – what do I get? Nothing.”

“You could date Helena,” Cosima says as Delphine finally crawls off her, worried she’ll forget herself again if she doesn’t. “I bet she’s up for a cute black market boyfriend.”

Felix chokes out a laugh as he sloshes hot water into three mugs, carelessly tossing a teabag into each one with practiced ease. “She’d be disappointed.”

He brings a cup to Delphine and stares at her a second too long before brushing past to Cosima. She’s not sure what it means, but she thinks his gaze had a reassuring air about it.

“Oh my god,” Felix says, almost spilling tea everywhere as he gets a good look at Cosima’s face. “Who did that to you?”

“What?” she says, and there’s a note of panic, “Is there blood?”

“Oh, the eyeliner was me,” Delphine clarifies. “I um, perhaps need some practice.”

Felix shakes his head, “What you need is to never touch an eyeliner pencil again. Get me a makeup wipe from the bathroom cabinet, I have to fix this.”

Delphine obliges.

“Is it really that bad?” she hears Cosima ask, and Felix picks up a spoon from the coffee table, holding it up close to one of Cosima’s eyes. “Oh wow, it kinda is.”

Delphine self-consciously hands Felix a wipe, but Cosima grabs Delphine’s hand, planting a kiss on her knuckles. “You have other skills, Delphine. Way more important.” She winks, and Delphine shakes her head with her heart full of pounding affection.

“Disgusting,” Felix comments, and catches Cosima’s chin with his fingers, delicately starting to remove the smudged black tremors from around Cosima’s eyes. Delphine watches from the bed, The Island of Doctor Moreau open on her lap again. There is something so frank and perfect about the moment in front of her: Cosima’s grinning lean with her hands on the knotted bend of Felix’s knees, his movements over her eyes careful and precise – it takes every ounce of strength Delphine has not to blurt out how much she loves both of them so completely.

 

 

 

Sarah arrives back at dusk with Alison in tow, barely acknowledging Delphine’s presence except to throw her a disparaging look that she supposes is a greeting. Alison mothers Cosima onto one of the armchairs as soon as she walks in, fussing with the blankets around her feet as Cosima tries her best to wave her off.

“Alison, I’m totally fine. You’re only gonna make yourself upset if you keep tugging at me like that.”

“I’m sorry, Cosima, you just look so pale. Have you eaten? Has Felix been feeding you? Do you want me to make you something?”

Cosima’s gaze flicks to Delphine, and there’s a note of amusement in her smile but there’s one of pleading in her eyes, and Delphine stands, oddly unbalanced in light of yet another same-but-different face.

“Alison?” she says, tentative and questing, and to her surprise Alison turns and regards her like she is ten feet tall; completely intimidated. Cosima, between them, holds in a laugh. Two wide-eyed deer in a clearing, both scared to death that the other is a predator.

“You’re Delphine,” Alison says, regaining her suburban politeness and extending a hand. “It’s um – well, I’ve heard a lot about you. You’re taller than I expected.”

Her voice quivers at the edges, and Delphine takes her outstretched hand in both her own. Alison seems so much smaller than her sisters, smaller than Sarah with her growling animal presence, smaller even than Cosima in her sickness. And definitely smaller than Rachel, the huntress, who towers with the kind of menace that fills entire rooms.

Delphine suddenly feels bizarrely protective of the stranger in front of her, wants to shake her head and say _no, it’s okay, I am the one who is afraid of_ you.

“It is very nice to meet you,” she says instead, imbuing it with every ounce of sincerity she possesses. “I…” _I love all of you_. _I will never betray you again_. “I wish it were under better circumstances.”

Alison lets out a breathy half-laugh in agreement. “Yes, well. At least it’s not under the worst circumstances.”

“About that,” Sarah interjects, her voice gruff against Alison’s fluting lilt, “We gotta do some reconnaissance on the DYAD, yeah?” She throws herself down onto the other armchair, all slumping spine and untied shoelaces, and waits with her Medusa-stare fixed on Delphine.

Alison perches herself neatly on the couch and Delphine follows suit, looking quickly at Cosima and seeing a smile alight on her face. Then she hears a rough “Oi, scooch,” on her left as Felix slots in beside her.

Sarah is still looking at her. There is a distrust in her that ranges like a wary dog, a _searching_ that makes Delphine feel like a threat. “Was it Rachel who sent you away?” she asks.

“The orders were delivered by Rachel but honestly I do not know,” Delphine replies, worried that Sarah will be angry that she’s failing yet again to give a definitive answer.

However, Sarah just turns to Cosima. “Cos, you know what happened to Scott?”

Cosima shakes her head. “He hasn’t answered any of my calls.”

“Right, well. I’ve got no clue if Rachel’s dead or what, but it looks like we’ve got leverage with Marion so once we find out, he’s first on the list. And your lab shit.”

Sarah was born to be a leader. Delphine thinks of broken puppet strings and these wolf wars that are fought not with guns, but with test tubes and lines of code and an identical set of bodies. She can feel Alison twitch beside her with nervous hands, Felix’s foot bumping her thigh as he jiggles his knee. She watches Sarah and Cosima volley words across the room, sisters and conspirators planning moves with troubled voices. This _family_ she is sandwiched into now, cobbled together from lies and mistakes and the will to survive.

She wants desperately to help, to offer any scraps of knowledge she might possess and let spill the feelings _she_ has about what to do with the DYAD.

Yes, the DYAD. Meat-eaters, flesh-tearers, white-backed wolves. They have taken from her, too, this corporation of hollowed out promises and praise, and something speaks to her inside her chest. _Burn_ , it says; declare yourself with fire and give them a taste of teeth and smoke. Let them die bound in flame.

Listen carefully to the music of their screams.

But she says nothing. She lets Sarah talk into the night, leans into the line of Felix’s arm on the back of the couch, smiles as Cosima tires gently in her seat and tries not to fall asleep.

Fire can wait. For now they will build.

 


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I need you to tell me, no bullshit: how long does Cosima have left?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> apparently i am now possessed by the need for sarah and delphine to be friends??????? idk man. idk. when will the madness end.
> 
> uh, also, kind of obvious but there is a lot of shall we say _fudging_ of canon events herein, for i am bad at science and also understanding the main plotline of this show so. ok. i should mention too that it super sucks that cosima's like for real sick at this point, bc i feel like this chapter is desperately lacking in porn.
> 
> ps. apologies to all my past screenwriting lecturers and anyone who has ever taught me the value of a story arc: this fanfiction does not have one. this chapter especially employs approximately none of the techniques that create a well-rounded story, there are no stakes to speak of, and............... i don't even care. whoops.

* * *

 

 

With Cosima being too sick to move around much, Felix’s place becomes a base of sorts, his door always opening and shutting with the arrival of Sarah, of Alison – even Art, once or twice, and Delphine finds herself in a strange kind of commonage; a world contained in a shabby, creaking-bones loft.

It’s a lot of people to cater for, a lot of strange relationships, but Cosima gets the bed, obviously, her own bones creaking with disease and a layer of guilt born from feeling like she’s taking up too much space. Delphine nestles in beside her, more often than not wedged between Felix as well, who regularly decides he can’t bear sleeping on the couch. He blames its lumpy foam and sloping frame, but Delphine doesn’t care. They are similarly long-limbed creatures who drape in tandem; arms and legs always angled towards Cosima like shelter from a storm, and it’s _comforting_ to be surrounded by warmth after the time she’s spent haunted by the cold.

 

And they work. At the breakfast table, in front of stacks of toast and notes, she reads Duncan’s book like a bible. Cover to cover and back again, she searches for the key to make sense of all his symbols – Cosima’s steady, visceral coughs carrying over from the bed and hollowing her out like fists against her spine.

“Can you keep it down over there?” Felix says, trying to keep things light, and Delphine looks up to see Cosima cheerily flipping him the bird with her face buried in a tissue. She smiles, tight and close to grimacing, and looks back down.

 

Sarah rolls in and out every other day, a contained little hurricane of unbrushed hair and leather pants, talking to Felix with a hip pressed to the kitchen counter. Delphine, still at arm’s length, is never entirely sure what they’re murmuring about, but she hears mention of Helena, of Marion and Castor and Scott, and even herself more than once. She doesn’t ask questions, because she knows Sarah’s attention is already spread so wide – trying to move Kira seamlessly between her father and Siobhan, trying to keep an ear out for news of Rachel, trying to figure out Helena’s disappearance – she doesn’t want to add her own fears to that equation.

Plus, Sarah still stares at her with that dog-wariness, eyes that fierce golden-brown that follow her movements like a prowling lion. Delphine tries not to feel like a broken gazelle when she knows Sarah’s watching, but her body tenses with skittish unease all the same.

 

 

 

Alison ends up next to her more often than not when she’s around, and whether it’s a respite from Felix and Cosima’s constant bratty retorts Delphine doesn’t know, but she accepts it.

She fidgets over a cup of coffee one morning, and that is what Delphine notices the most about Alison – she is never _still_ , she flits in starts like a curious bird, her hands always at her mouth or tapping against her chest. Delphine wants to take her hands and quiet them against her own chest, let the beat of her heart settle the bird wings to something calm and heavy. There is a melancholy about Alison that continues to inspire something protective in her, and it’s only her own shyness that stops her from acting on it.

“Cosima,” Alison says suddenly, the word cutting primly into the silence, “Are you okay? Do you need any more coffee?”

“No, Alison, I didn’t need anything the last time you asked, either,” Cosima replies, head bent over her own set of notes and codes.

Alison huffs out some note of indignation, and sips at the cup in her hands.

“She is grumpy in the mornings; I do not let her smoke anymore,” Delphine murmurs, almost to herself, and Alison jumps a little beside her.

“Oh,” she says, clearly unsure of how to proceed. They still haven’t talked much beyond their initial conversation the night they met, and Delphine still feels a strange kind of intimidation emanating from Alison whenever she speaks to her.

“What um, what are you doing with that book, exactly?” she asks, and her hands flicker in Delphine’s peripheral vision, hands like flurries of feathers.

Delphine turns, smiles at Alison’s brave attempt to engage, and slides the book towards her. “It is a cipher. This is where Duncan coded all of the synthetic sequences that—well—” she pauses, not sure whether Alison will be offended if she implies that she’s any less human than Delphine is.

“That make us possible,” Alison supplies, and Delphine nods, getting the impression that Alison is just glad to have a topic to anchor herself to. She’s so practiced in her politeness Delphine’s heart aches.

She picks up her train of thought again. “The problem we have is that the sequences are still encoded – to us, at least – the cipher is a conlang of sorts and we cannot yet decrypt it. It is non-repeating in nature, every ‘word’ is different and there is no pattern that I can see. So here,” she runs a hand over a page scribbled with guesses and translations, “I have tried to take what I see from these diagrams and connect them to the sequences Scott decoded at DYAD, and then there are some words here that I think could be the English translations. Some… I have tried to use French, first, it is probably silly, Duncan is unlikely to have taken any influence from it, but it is easier for me this way, and anything is worth a try once.”

She looks up at Alison, oddly sheepish at the long string of words now dissolving on the air. She can hear her accent strongly in them, a side-effect of bigger sentences and excitement at being able to explain this to someone, but Alison is smiling faintly at her with no trace of mocking.

“I think that’s very… very clever of you, Delphine. And it certainly doesn’t hurt to try.”

She is so motherly, Delphine thinks, _without even realizing, she always mothers_. She turns back to her puzzle, but Alison puts a light hand on her arm.

“Is there anything I can do to help? I feel so useless here, so _in the way_ , but I don’t want to miss anything – and it’s good for me to be on hand to help with Cosima—”

“No it isn’t,” Cosima helpfully shoots over from the bed, and she smiles innocently when both Alison and Delphine look up at her.

Alison clears her throat, carefully ignoring her sister, and says, “But I would like to help, if I can.”

Delphine thinks for a moment. “Well, I have categorized some of these words into different groups – see, these are all words that have some relation to genetic markers, and these, they are to do with nucleotides – if you wanted to rewrite them on new pieces of paper and colour-code the categories that would be helpful.”

It wouldn’t, really, but the way Alison’s face lights up at the mention of colour-coding convinces Delphine she’s done the right thing in assigning her the task.

She meets Cosima’s gaze for a moment, and Cosima rolls her eyes – you _panderer_ – but she says nothing.

 

 

 

(After a while, Delphine realizes it feels strange that no one is _watching_ them. She had unwittingly started to operate under the assumption that someone was always going to be at her shoulder, tiny little cameras keeping her constantly in some perverted spotlight like a rat in a lab. There is no one to report to, now, no one she has to ask for permission, and it hits her how _unnatural_ things had gotten. It makes her wonder once again about Frankfurt, about the Delphine-who-could-have-been.

Nervously, she wonders what the DYAD are doing about the Delphine who is living here in this loft, holding onto pages of secrets they so desperately want.)

 

 

One night when they’re lying in Felix’s bed Cosima turns into her side – an aching, laboured movement that it hurts Delphine to watch. She takes Cosima’s outstretched hand and traces the spiral on her wrist, spinning her finger in steady circles.

“We’re not getting closer, are we?” Cosima asks, and something about the tired, quavering tone of her voice makes it impossible for Delphine to lie to her.

“Not yet.”

Cosima sighs. The sound lies heavy across the bridge of her nose, and she resists the urge to pinch it.

“Cosima, we—”

Her phone buzzes, and she looks at Cosima, seeing confusion on her face too. The phone only has Cosima’s number and Felix’s in it, because she’s still been too shy to ask for Sarah’s or Alison’s. And since Felix is currently breathing steadily at her back, an arm jammed in against her spine, it can’t be from him.

She reaches across Cosima. The phone glows brightly, but when she reads the message her blood runs cold.

“What?” Cosima says, frowning at Delphine’s sudden terror-stillness.

Delphine shakes her head, and holds the phone up so Cosima can see.

 _Your absence has been noticed, Dr Cormier_.

 

It takes Felix checking the corridor and the stairs with a can of mace to convince her that DYAD isn’t lurking around the corner and ready to strike any moment. There are no wolves in the sewers below them, no hawks breaking in above, for now, and as soon as Felix gets back inside he throws the phone out the window, watching it break on the pavement below.

But even with Cosima’s hand secured in hers, even with Felix’s protective warmth against the line of her hip, she can hear birds singing before she sleeps that night, the sky slowly lightening above her head. Her pulse keeps racing like a frightened horse every time she thinks about that message; skittering up and down her sternum and making her breath catch hard in her lungs.

 

Suddenly she can’t shake the terrifying, consuming feeling that has settled on her chest: _we are close to being found_.

 

 

 

After that scare, she starts smoking like she did in college. Twice a day, once in the morning and once at night, she whittles away the cigarettes in her possession, chatting occasionally to the towelled man who runs the steam baths. Every time a car goes past, her heart thumps loudly against the column of her neck, and she grits her teeth until they ache.

 

Felix turns up at her shoulder one morning, and she almost knocks the coffee he’s holding for her right out of his hand, choking on a puff of smoke.

“Jesus, calm down. It’s not the bloody Gestapo. Just your morning caffeine boost, because I know you’ve slept roughly five minutes since you got that text the other night.”

“Who is with Cosima?” she asks, trying to keep the panicked note out of her voice as she hooks the coffee cup through her fingers.

Felix’s eyes just about roll clean out of his head. “ _Sarah_. Children of the bleedin’ corn, Delphine, have you been taking paranoia lessons from Alison, or something? Because I think you may have surpassed even her at this point.”

He takes the cigarette from her, sucking in a drag and letting it plume haughtily out of his mouth, a frown forming across his brow. “Ugh, stale.”

“It’s my last one,” she says, taking it back. “I have not had ti—I have not been out to buy more.”

Felix makes a noise that’s halfway between amusement and disapproval. “Yeah, _I know_.” He digs in the pocket of his coat and finds a few crumpled bills. Shoving them into her hand, he untangles the coffee cup from her fingers and gives her a nudge in the small of her back.

“We’re out of teabags, too,” he says, and shakes his head when she starts to protest. “We can handle Cosima for fifteen minutes, and I promise Leo in the convenience store can handle the bags under your eyes. He’s seen worse, trust me.”

 

The trip goes uneventfully – for a terrifying moment she thinks she’s being followed as a car pulls up to the sidewalk, but a few seconds later a woman runs out from a nearby building into the back seat, and the car peels off again.

But when she gets up the stairs the door won’t slide, and she can hear muffled noises of panic from inside the loft. She knocks hard, knuckles bruising against the metal, and calls Felix’s name.

For a moment, there’s nothing, and fear rises in her throat, but then Felix pulls back the door and she spills through to find Sarah helping Cosima out of bed and down to the couch.

There’s a lot of blood.

“It’s okay,” Cosima says, wrestling with her cardigan that’s now heavy and sticky red, “Just another seizure.”

“Sure, Cos,” Sarah replies, her voice several octaves too high, “Nothing to worry about.”

Delphine drops her bag on the floor and goes to help them, ridding Cosima of her layers and finding her something new to wear while Felix strips the bed.

“Sorry, you guys,” Cosima says, “I’m being a real drag.”

Delphine wipes a smear of blood off Cosima’s jaw with her thumb and shakes her head. “It’s not your fault.”

 

 

 

(Sometimes at night Cosima lies in bed and tells her about the things she wants to do – she’s never gone skydiving, and _Delphine, are you afraid of heights? It’s weird that I don’t know that_ – and Delphine holds the inside of her cheek between her molars until she tastes blood on her tongue.

She wants to tell Cosima to talk about something else, to stop speaking as though she is dying. But of course, then she remembers: Cosima _is_ dying.)

 

 

 

Felix helps Cosima shower occasionally, when he sees the line of Delphine’s shoulders go crooked from too much weight, and she often listens to them squabbling in the bathroom like they’ve been related all their lives.

One day he asks about life after death, and Delphine feels her whole body snap to attention as she changes the sheets on the bed. Her nerves prickle; _Cosima is a scientist_ , she thinks, _of course she doesn’t believe in a life after death_.

But even as the thought crosses her mind she remembers Cosima’s love of the stars, she thinks about minds spanning galaxies and consciousness spreading through cracks in the earth – things Cosima has mentioned (sometimes sober, mostly not) that Delphine knows she believes somewhere beneath hard facts and science.

“Maybe I’ll get reincarnated into a sea slug,” Cosima says, and Delphine can hear her making lecherous sucking sounds over the spill of water in the tub.

“Ugh,” Felix replies, “I’d rather you become a ghost, at least you’d get some fun out of it. You could haunt Rachel forever.”

There’s the sound of water splashing, and Felix’s somewhat damp splutters before Cosima says, “Nah, I’d rather haunt you and Sarah instead.”

He laughs freely, taking the joke as it is intentioned, but in the other room Delphine thinks: _if you die you will not have to become a ghost to haunt me_.

 

 

Cosima begins to sleep until she’s napping more often than she’s not, hands clenched at her sides and her breath slipping out in uneven rasps. Delphine listens and her heart skips in the silences, stuttering out and back into rhythm when Cosima’s chest rises again.

 

 

 

She stops reading Duncan’s book. The hope that had seemed so certain a week ago has started to shrivel, turning brittle like dried up fallen leaves. She starts to wonder about the average price of a funeral, and whether Cosima’s parents ought to know that their daughter is dying. She’s asked her not to call, because they haven’t been “cool” for years, as Cosima likes to say. And Delphine won’t, if only because there is a strange kind of symmetry in the thought that her parents have no idea that she’s alive either.

 

 

 

The others start to treat her like a gatekeeper, always finding her and asking _how’s our girl_ when they get in, like Cosima’s off-limits without Delphine’s permission.

And she thinks, selfishly, how can Cosima be _ours_? How can she be _theirs_ when they have spent months watching from afar? They haven’t had to watch every weakening step Cosima has taken; they haven’t scrubbed bloodstains from their clothing, or out from under their nails where it still feels caked even though she’s scrubbed her fingers raw. They have no idea what this disease has done, not really.

The rational part of her can’t fault them – Cosima didn’t want them to know, and they’re here now doing everything they can, her fierce family – but the selfish part still thinks: _she will never be yours_.

 

 

Felix regularly tries to make her go to the store for him, now, attempting to send her out for milk like a child; teabags (always teabags) and bread and tomatoes that are all suddenly so important, but most of the time she refuses. It’s true that she hasn’t felt fresh air without the added flavour of cigarette smoke in a week, that her veins are starting to track vivid blues and greens along the skin of her arms from lack of sun – but Cosima breathes under her watch and she doesn’t want to think about what might happen if she decides tomatoes take precedence over that gentle rise and fall of her chest.

 

 

 

(Of course, she knows she _does_ have to leave, sooner or later. The DYAD sits like a vault in the back of her mind, sealed and smug with the knowledge she needs. There are answers in that building, and she has to go _back_.)

 

 

 

When Sarah arrives back at the loft one night she’s frazzled, and before Delphine can work up the courage to ask her anything Sarah’s crossing the room and tugging on her arm with hasty fingers.

Delphine lets herself be dragged out into the hall, and Sarah pulls up close.

“I need you to tell me, no bullshit: how long does Cosima have left?”

Delphine closes her eyes. She has been waiting for this – the one thing she wishes wouldn’t occupy her mind but sits relentlessly, pulsing just behind her eyelids. A countdown that sounds like a waning heartbeat, spelling out the number of breaths Cosima has left.

“I cannot say definitively, but we are speaking in weeks, now,” she says eventually. “Not many. Three, perhaps. If we are lucky.”

She still has trouble meeting Sarah’s eyes, remembers all too well the bitterness and contempt that haunted them not so long ago. But Sarah is looking at her now with something akin to pity, and her hand flexes at her side.

“It’s okay,” Delphine says; _you don’t have to comfort me_. “I know we are running out of time. I actually wanted to speak to you about it myself.”

“Shit,” Sarah breathes. Then she says something Delphine almost can’t believe. “I’ve got a way back into DYAD, but I’m gonna need your help.”

“Anything,” Delphine replies. And she means it, reminders of fire breathing at the ends of her fingers.

“Can you be ready to leave in ten minutes?”

“Of course.”

She feels something catch alight.

 

 

There is a car outside the building when she follows Sarah downstairs – after Cosima tells her to be careful and kisses her mouth, kisses with something that feels terrifyingly like _goodbye_ – and she’s surprised to see Siobhan in the driver’s seat.

“Evening, Delphine,” she says, just shy of chilly, and fixes her foster daughter with a look of understanding. “We’re ready then.”

With a nod from Sarah, she pulls out onto the street.

 

Delphine shares the back seat with a shotgun. The metal glints under passing streetlights and fills her with a unique sense of dread, and as she watches the DYAD’s glowing bulk grow larger out the window, that dread condenses into full-blown fear. She thinks about a text on a phone smashed to pieces, and suddenly realizes she has no idea whether Sarah intends for them to come out of this alive.

Delphine doesn’t notice Siobhan’s glance in the rear view mirror. “Delphine,” she says, and her eyes snap up. “I don’t need any panic attacks at this point. Take a deep breath, child. We’re not deliverin’ you to the wolves.”

A fist clenching, Delphine nods. She lets out the breath caught in her throat.

Sarah twists around in her seat. “Listen, I need you to stay here for a minute while I scope the place out – Marion guaranteed us a way in, but y’know, her _affiliations_ with DYAD mean she can’t be tied to anything we do, so—”

“She will not vouch if we are caught,” Delphine says, understanding. “There is a side door at the service entrance, I have used it before. A security guard patrols the entire far side of the building, but the door itself is not alarmed. We can use it to get out, possibly, if… if there are no other options.”

“Good,” Sarah says, though Delphine can’t tell if she means it or not.

Then Sarah’s up and out of the car, door shutting behind her with an echoing slam. It’s eerily quiet all of a sudden, her and Siobhan watching Sarah’s disappearing stride, the hood of her jacket pulled up over her head.

“How’s Cosima?” Siobhan asks after a moment, still watching after Sarah.

Delphine looks at her hands. Sees blood. “She is alive.”

Siobhan makes a noise that sounds close to a chuckle. “Counting our blessings, I see.”

“Yes,” Delphine says, and it’s so quiet that she’s not even sure Siobhan hears.

There’s a pause, then Siobhan sighs, a long exhale brimming with the same kind of weight Delphine carries herself. “If she’s anything like her sister, love, she’s got fight left yet.”

It’s the term of endearment more than anything that sets her lip to trembling, and she digs her nails into her palms to keep her eyes from welling up. It’s hard to remember the last time she heard one of those, and she thinks: I know. I know. I have done nothing to deserve it.

Siobhan doesn’t offer anything else, her gaze back out the window again, but Delphine is glad that if she has to sit in this car, in the cold, with the world pressing in, that at least she is not alone. Siobhan has never shown her contempt the same way her foster children have, even with a shotgun balanced under her hand like another limb, and for that she is grateful. For these small things, she can be grateful.

 

Sarah arrives back within five minutes and opens Delphine’s door, shoving a hand inside without ceremony. Delphine takes it and finds herself pulled out, left for a moment while Sarah leans down and says something to Siobhan she can’t hear. When she straightens and looks at Delphine, there’s fear in her eyes, but her voice is steady.

“You ready to do this?”

Delphine nods.

The night above them gapes like a yawn, a beckoning black that threatens to swallow as they hurry to the DYAD’s entrance.

Before they reach it, though, Sarah tugs her to a stop with an awkward hand on her arm. Her expression is hard to read, but Delphine thinks she can see that same cagey unease she’s come to find familiar about Sarah. She is afraid of what Sarah is going to say: _end of the line; this is where I leave you; enjoy the iron bars_. What she actually says is something Delphine never expected to hear.

“Look, Delphine,” she starts, and her name crunches like gravel, like rocks between her teeth, “I’m not one for big apologies, yeah, but I’m gonna feel guilty if I don’t say—I might’a misjudged you. When Cosima told me Rachel had tried to send you to Frankfurt… you didn’t check out on her – on us. That’s—that’s more than a lotta people would’ve done.”

“Cosima…” she starts, then shakes her head. She doesn’t want Sarah to think she stayed out of guilt, or some misguided loyalty to DYAD’s failed experiment. “I love her,” she says, the words scraping and raw and truer than anything she’s ever known.

Sarah nods. Sarah has seen and she believes. “We don’t have much time.”

“I know.”

 

A guard at the door lets them in and leads the way. It’s too late for receptionists and the usual bustle of the main floor, so they pass unnoticed by any human eyes, but Delphine tries not to look where she knows there are cameras. She hopes that whatever Marion has promised Sarah holds true.

She also tries not to wonder what kind of compromise Sarah has made to get them in here in the first place, and strays closer to her steady presence like it will help to quell her thoughts.

 

They follow familiar corridors that feel spectral to her now, folding over like shiny hollow cages of ribs, the twists leading them deeper, colder. Leekie’s wing is dark, lit only by the glow of his culture fridge, and in its yellowed light their escort turns to them.

“You will have less than five minutes,” he says, and then he’s gone.

Sarah looks at her. “Your time to shine,” she says, and pushes through the door.

Delphine goes to the fridge and can see immediately that there’s nothing there that will help them. It’s almost empty, and none of the vials hold Kira’s marrow. Sarah is certain Rachel smashed only three, but where the other one is she has no clue. She watches Sarah for a moment, rifling through Leekie’s drawers, practiced like a sniper – like a criminal – then she remembers.

Gently moving Sarah aside, she opens the cabinet in Leekie’s desk and hears a whistle near her ear.

“Nice,” Sarah says. “You DYAD folk really like locking things away.”

They both kneel in front of the safe, a yellow light blinking at them from the lock. “It is a four digit code, but I do not know it,” Delphine says. So much for her brilliant idea.

Sarah huffs out some vaguely condescending noise, and pulls a lockpick out of her pocket. “Keep the light on it for me?” she asks, and hands Delphine her phone.

Holding up the light, she watches Sarah pick the lock panel clean off the safe in a matter of seconds, her fingers skilful and dexterous. She pulls a set of wires free, and Delphine hears a beep and a click.

“Remind me never to invest in a safe like this one,” Delphine murmurs, and sees a flash of teeth from the corner of her eye.

“I can open the old school ones too, but they take longer,” Sarah says. “You can do the honors, if you like.”

Delphine opens the safe door, heart in her mouth. She rather expects it to be empty, cleaned out after Leekie’s death and left to mock them. What she finds instead sends her hands into disbelieving tremors, her jaw dropping almost to the floor.

“What?” Sarah says, looking over her shoulder at a series of codes she doesn’t understand. “What is it, more genetic sequences?”

“Sarah, this… did you know Rachel had this?”

“Had _what_? I can’t read all those bloody numbers, Delphine, it’s gibberish to me.”

Delphine can’t even process what she’s holding in her hands. “These… they are the sequences we have been trying to decipher from Duncan’s book. The ones to help cure Cosima’s illness.”

She can’t keep the excitement out of her voice, rocking back on her heels and looking up at Sarah’s furrowed expression. This is it. There is no more to guess. There is no more need for late nights stringing into grey, bleary mornings, or for Alison’s carefully colour-coded categories she still has sitting neatly in a binder. The hope that had died out, that had shrivelled up into a crooked, broken skeleton of itself, suddenly blooms up and spreads around her like wings, gripping hard to the muscle of her heart.

“Shite, how long was Rachel planning on sitting on those for?” Sarah asks, and though the question is rhetorical it hangs in the air like smoke, and begs another: just how cold can a human being get?

Delphine hands the sequences up to Sarah and looks back in the safe. There’s a small medical bag shoved right at the back, and her fingers tremble again as she digs it out. Unzipping it, she pulls out one final vial of Kira’s bone marrow and holds it up to the light.

Sarah hisses through her teeth and Delphine thinks it’s because she’s pleased, but when she looks up Sarah’s attention isn’t even on her. In another second she’s crouched down next to Delphine, shoulder pressing hard against her own and a finger held tightly to her lips.

She puts the marrow carefully back in the bag and zips it up, placing it in the small backpack slung over Sarah’s arm.

“I think we’re gonna need your emergency exit,” Sarah mutters, and grabs the edge of her sleeve. “I’ve got zero bloody idea where we even are, so you’re leading the way. Go.”

Delphine scrambles up, and then they’re fleeing down corridors she’s barely keeping track of, hoping with all her heart that she’s not steering them wrong, until finally she can see the door they need, unbolting it with quick fingers and—

Opening it almost straight into the waiting barrel of a security guard’s gun.

“Don’t move,” he says. “Got permission to shoot.”

He looks right at Delphine when he says it, and Sarah must notice, because Delphine can feel her bristling.

“Please,” Delphine says quietly, gaze on Sarah’s wild mane of hair next to her. “You have what we came for. Run.” _Run_ , she thinks. _We are wasting time_.

Sarah spares her a surprised look, and then they’re both distracted by the sound of a safety catch being flicked off. Delphine closes her eyes. She doesn’t know what bullets feel like, and she doesn’t want to see it coming.

But it’s not the security guard’s voice they hear next.

“I’d put that down if I were you,” Siobhan’s voice says, and Delphine’s eyes fly open. She sees her step out into the light, her shotgun trained at the guard’s head. “Go and get in the car, loves,” she says, her voice not an octave out of balance. Her whole body is still and coiled, not a wisp of hair moving in the wind. “I’ll be there in a minute.”

Sarah pulls on her wrist and they run, Delphine trying not to listen for the sound of guns, trying not to think of a tiny cap of metal ripping her insides apart. Sarah slides into the driver’s seat of the car, turning the key and putting it in gear before Delphine’s even got the back door closed. She swings it around, and moments later Siobhan appears at Delphine’s window. Delphine scoots across the seat to let her in, feeling the shotgun press up against her thigh before Siobhan sends it over the back into the trunk.

They breathe out in unison, and Sarah drives.

When she can no longer see the DYAD, when Sarah hands her the backpack and she can see its contents are safe and intact – when it sinks in that for the first time in weeks they’re no longer running just on the fumes of wishful thinking, that she finally holds some semblance of a _cure_ … her whole body starts to shake and she can’t make it stop. Her fingers tremble so hard she can’t do anything but hold them in her lap, and the spasms down her spine make her shoulders quake like shifting earth.

She closes her eyes, and feels the warm span of a hand on her back. “You’re all right, love.”

“I’m sorry,” Delphine says, wanting to apologise for seeming so out of control. She knows that Siobhan and Sarah both have so much more experience in this – in flights of fear, in the pump of stuttering adrenaline that consumes and drains – and it makes her feel inadequate.

Siobhan chooses to change the subject, hand sliding down her arm and around Delphine’s unsteady fingers. The touch, warm and maternal, quiets the shaking, quiets the savage beat of her heart. “Did you find what you were looking for?”

Delphine smiles, feeling tears well up under her eyelids. “Yes.”

She thinks of Cosima’s face and the incredulous grin she can imagine spreading across it when she tells her; she imagines Cosima finally standing on her feet without an arm to support her, vibrant and whole. Laughing without a cough that threatens like rain, kissing her without the taste of blood. Delphine will finally have the time to make up for what she’s done.

She lets a sob lodge itself high in the back of her throat; lets Sarah drive. She clutches Siobhan’s hand, clutches hard the bag that promises the rest of Cosima’s life, and thinks:

 _Yes_.

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i really struggled with how to finish this, bc it seemed like it was important to have a reaction from cosima - but at the same time, this whole fic was never really building to a proper resolution, so i guess my love for ambiguity won out once again. 
> 
> also like, we've all met (unless we haven't, hello, thank you for reading), i am not your resident fluff writer, i really only like humor if it is bookended by a heaping dose of angst and sadness. BASICALLY..... THIS........ IS THE END CONGRATULATIONS U MADE IT??? there will not be a follow up, i do not write epilogues or add-ons or anything yk, cool, that cool people do, bc i am not cool, so. thank you very much for taking the time to read this, if you have, this fic has been one of my favourites to write bc i love making delphine a proper protagonist, i loved making a story for her to excel in in a way she doesn't get to in the show, and i am really appreciative of all the feedback i've gotten that expresses those same feelings. thank you. please let me know what you think.


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